Parallella Forum, SDK, Boards, and More

Progress is definitely speeding up for the Parallella project, but as always time is the enemy...Here are some of the things we have been done in the last few weeks.

Parallella Forums:

The forum is now up and running at forums.parallella.org. You should have received an email with a user name and password. We successfully pre-registered over 4,300 user names based on your kickstarter surveys. If you didn't receive your user name and password, try recovering your password from the forum "forgotten password" option by specifying the user name and email specified in the kickstarter survey.

We will do our best to support the community through Kickstarter, Facbeook, Google+, Twitter, Email, etc but in order to be as efficient as possible most of our energy will be spent on the Parallella forum. We urge everyone to come by the forum and let the discussions begin.

SDK Status

On December 1st we provided SDK access to the approximately 250 backers who received the SDK as part of their pledge level or by adding the early SDK option. A more impressive SDK release will be available by December 31st. Our partners Embecsom and Brown Deer Technology are setting up open source github repositories for the GNU and OpenCL portions of the tool chain. Adapteva will manage the sources repository for some of the low level sources and utility libraries.

Hardware Status:

Lots of work was done stabilizing the Parallella prototype platform. It's starting to look really good and the feeling is that we are not far off! We will be shipping some of the early prototypes on schedule by December 31st. From a programmers standpoint, these will be virtually identical to the final boards and will serve as a great demonstration vehicle of the Parallella platform.We hope some of these early backers will do somethingreally cool with their platforms and share the results with the rest of the community. For the May shipments, there are still some critical parts- pricing and manufacturing questions that need to be resolved, but rest assure that we are working VERY hard to make sure we achieve our targets.

Pre Ordering Parallella:

We have received LOTS of questions about pre-ordering Parallella boards and we are sad to report that we can't offer any more boards for now. There is still too much uncertainty around the final cost of the Parallella board to offer it up to general sale. We hope to have all the cost issues resolved soon!

Parallella Community News:

We are pleased to announce that we have brought in Andrew Back to energize the Parallella community. Andrew leads the UK Open Source Hardware group and is a former Open Source evangelist for
BT. We welcome Andrew to the team. (We need you desperately!) The Parallella community is incredibly international with over 2,000 backers coming from 68 countries! We think that's very cool! Check out the interesting graph showing what countries backed Parallella in droves.

@all We'll send out another mass personalized email through constant contact shortly. Looks like things did not work out well with the registration emails. The script was tested and working on a small scale but perhaps sending out 4,000 emails in 10 minutes was too much..

@New Zealand We apologize! We assure you that we design better than we spell.:-)